http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-we-arent-talking-enough-about-cybersecurity-2016-1?IR=T
John McAfee, Jan. 17, 2016,
We all know the publicized issues facing the American voters in the upcoming presidential election. And we have heard each candidate proclaim and re-proclaim, and sometimes change their proclamations on each issue. So forgive me if I insist on listing them here. I obtained the list, by the way, from the whitehouse.govwebsite.
The top five issues are: the economy, education, energy and environment, immigration and health care. The sub issues were listed as: Civil rights, disabilities, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, taxes and a dozen more.
Cybersecurity was not listed at all.
Let me tell you what is strange about this:
In November of 2014, NSA Director Michael Rogers testified that Chinese cyber hackers can shut down the power grid in the United States and essentially end life as we know it in America.
In May of the same year expert testimony to Congress stated flatly - “A cyber attack on the US power grid would kill 9 out of every 10 Americans and leave the US in another century.”
And earlier this year a panel at the University of Tel Aviv concluded that an all out cyber war would mean the end of the world as we know it.
These are but few of the hundreds of warnings written and spoken by some of the top cyber security experts in the world, including myself. Has our government and political machinery gone deaf, or are these warnings, dire as they are, beyond the comprehension of our technologically illiterate political structure?
If such is the case, let me attempt to simplify the issue.
For the purpose of our discussion I'm going to ignore the near certainty that a cyber attack will disable all of our civilian and military communications, cause airplanes to fall out of the sky (yes, they can be commandeered remotely), our emergency services will be disabled, and our automated weapons will be turned against ourselves. I will ignore the hundreds of other atrocities which will certainly be manifest in the first few minutes of a true cyberattack.
Instead, I'm going to talk about our power grid. It's a simple issue which we can all understand. Of all our infrastructures, the electrical power grid is the most fragile. In the 2013 Infrastructure Report Card, prepared by the American Society of Civil Engineers, our power grid received a grade of D. Why? Because it is antiquated and vulnerable.
The US power grid.
When we talk about the grid, we are actually talking about three independent, but interconnected grids. There is an eastern grid, a western grid and the Texas grid. Each operating with different automated control systems.
When one of these grids become overloaded by demand or by loss of power production, the national system automatically compensates, bringing in resources from farther away to provide the needed power. Purposefully incorrect allocations, strategically sequenced and modulated, would overload subsets of the grid, causing instability and eventual meltdown. Weaponized software, strategically inserted into the grid’s control centers, would turn our grid into a pile of burned out rubble when activated.
“Is this even possible?” You might ask. For the first time in history, a national power grid was disabled by hackers for half a day in the middle of winter in the Ukraine.
This happened on December 23rd 2015, Less than three weeks ago. The hackers used a crude piece of weaponized software called “BlackEnergy”. The software cannot even be compared to the weaponized software in the possession of the Chinese and the Russians. Former NSA Chief, General Michael Hayden, called the Ukrainian hack a “sign of darkening skies for America.”
A cyber war is clearly on the horizon.
I ask you now, to add up all of the political issues outlined above, and compare those combined issues with the prospect of total annihilation of our nation, our culture and our identity.
Do you see the strangeness in Cybersecurity appearing nowhere on anyone’s agenda?
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